Obama pledges renewed push on Gitmo

By DONOVAN SLACK

04/30/2013 12:20 PM EDT

President Obama says he hasn't given up on closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

"I'm going to go back at this," he said Tuesday. "I've asked my team to review everything that's currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively, and I'm going to re-engage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that's in the best interests of the American people."

He said the facility is expensive, inefficient, "a recruitment tool for terrorists" and hurts America's international standing, and he took Congress to task for blocking its closure.

Obama conceded that it may be a difficult case to make to the American people that the detainees should be transferred out so the facility can be shuttered, because, "I think for a lot of Americans, the notion is out of sight, out of mind, and it's easy to demagogue the issue. That's what happened the first time this came up."

He said the Pentagon is trying hard to deal with detainees staging a hunger strike.

"I don't want these individuals to die," he said. "Obviously, the Pentagon is trying to manage the situation as best as they can. But I think all of us should reflect on why exactly are we doing this. Why are we doing this?"

Obama said other suspected terrorists have been tried through the U.S. court system under the U.S. Constitution without issue and are serving sentences in U.S. prisons.

"So we can handle this. And I understand that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the traumas that had taken place, why, for a lot of Americans, the notion was somehow that we had to create a special facility like Guantanamo, and we couldn't handle this in -- in a normal, conventional fashion. I understand that reaction," he said. "But we're now over a decade out. We should be wiser. We should have more experience at -- in how we prosecute terrorists. And this is a lingering, you know, problem that is not going to get better. It's going to get worse. It's going to fester.

"And so I'm going to -- as I've said before, we're -- examine every option that we have administratively to try to deal with this issue."